Abstract
Abbe’s resolution limit, one of the best-known physical limitations, poses a great challenge for any wave system in imaging, wave transport, and dynamics. Originally formulated in linear optics, the Abbe limit can be broken using nonlinear optical interactions. We extend the Abbe theory into a nonlinear regime and experimentally demonstrate a far-field, label-free, and scan-free super-resolution imaging technique based on nonlinear four-wave mixing to retrieve near-field scattered evanescent waves, achieving a sub-wavelength resolution of λ / 5.6. This method paves the way for numerous new applications in biomedical imaging, semiconductor metrology, and photolithography.
Highlights
The spatial resolution of an imaging system is limited by the Abbe theory,[1] posing a great challenge for many areas such as biomedical imaging, astronomy, and photolithography
The extra phase term induced by the illumination beam expðik3;evaxÞ effectively shifts the angular spectrum of the images in k-space by k3;eva[37] as shown in Fig. 3(b), which represents the finer portion of the image with better resolution
Similar ideas have been realized by total internal reflection (TIR),[7] surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs),[10] and guided waves[8,9] to achieve super-resolution along a single direction in k-space
Summary
The spatial resolution of an imaging system is limited by the Abbe theory,[1] posing a great challenge for many areas such as biomedical imaging, astronomy, and photolithography. Zhou et al.: Far-field super-resolution imaging by nonlinearly excited evanescent waves coupling of SPP19,20 and dark-field imaging.[21] These works show a unique way to nonlinearly couple non-propagating evanescent waves with propagating ones into the far field, addressing the key issue for the aforementioned super-resolution imaging problem in the framework of nonlinear Abbe theory It may enable a fluorophore-label-free imaging method in contrast to the existing techniques such as stimulated emission depletion microscopy,[22] stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy,[3] structured illumination microscopy (SIM),[23,24] where label-free imaging techniques are highly desirable in biomedical imaging[25] and in other areas such as semiconductor metrology processes. This technique may offer a new way for critical imaging tasks sensitive to fluorescent labels such as biomedical applications, semiconductor processes, and photolithography
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